Monday, October 31, 2016

There is a lot of anti-immigration talk these days -- notably from The Orange One south of the border. So some people in Canada raised their eyebrows when, last week, the Century Initiative proposed that the population of Canada should be 100 million people by the end of this century. At first glance that might seem like a radical number. But Andrew Coyne puts it in perspective:

Canada’s population has grown at an average of 1.1 per cent per
year. Were we merely to stay on our current growth trajectory, by 2100
the population would have risen to more than 90 million. So we are
mostly talking about maintaining the status quo, higher immigration
compensating for declining fertility.

Arguments raised to date
against the proposal amount to objecting that 100 million is more than
we have now. The reader is invited to believe that the present
population of Canada is, by a remarkable coincidence, precisely the
ideal number, such that any additions could only make things worse. And
yet the same objections could have been used to argue against current
population levels in 1945, when our population was a third of what it is
today. “Are you ready for a Toronto of 20 million and a Vancouver of 10
million?” asks one particularly overheated correspondent. Gosh, I don’t
know: you mean like New York and Paris?

The last time Canada opened its doors so widely was under Wilfred Laurier -- and there was a backlash from "old stock" Canadians. What would happen when those Ukrainians filled up the empty prairies? The answer was and is obvious. They became good Canadians. And the Laurier precedent suggests that there are three good reasons to welcome new immigrants to Canada:

One reason goes back to Laurier and Leacock, and the optimism and
self-confidence of their era. I don’t think it’s coincidence that this
was also a time of high immigration. Ambitious countries want to grow,
but growth also makes countries ambitious. The constant injections of
energy from new arrivals has always made this a different place than
non-immigrant societies. We could use a little more of that.

Second,
it would add to our clout in the world. We would be growing at a time
when our peers are shrinking. At 100 million, current United Nations
projections suggest we would be second only to the United States (it is
forecast to grow to 450 million) among the G-7, vaulting past Japan,
France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

A final point. Countries with larger populations enable people to live
larger lives. They open possibilities to talented, ambitious people that
are not possible elsewhere — and talented, ambitious people will always
seek them out. To be a Canadian historically has been to watch many of
our best and brightest leave in pursuit of their dreams. Nearly three
million Canadians now live outside our borders, a third of them in the
United States.

It is fashionable these days to be myopic about immigration. But the world is awash in refugees. And most of us were refugees from some place. We know how to do immigration.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Donald Trump knows how to play people for suckers. That talent -- if you can call it that -- has been on display throughout his presidential campaign. The latest example is FBI Director James Comey. Frank Bruni writes in the New York Times:

How
strange but how fitting. This entire election is being conducted in the
key of hysteria, and Comey just found a way to amplify that ugly music.

Listen,
Clinton made an awful decision in setting up a private email server,
then compounded that error by dragging her feet through defensive
non-apologies that gave the story such legs. Now she limps to the finish
line when she should be hitting full stride.

But
Trump is as much of a part and player in this latest chapter of the
email saga, because of the one-syllable grenade that he keeps lobbing at
the body politic, his furious mantra over these final weeks.

“Rigged,”
“rigged,” “rigged.” Many Americans have come to believe that. Many
others are rightly determined to prove to that group how wrong they are,
or at least not to add accelerant to the wildfire.

And so all of us, including Comey, operate in a befouled atmosphere, tailoring our actions to it.

There are established rules for FBI investigations -- rules which Comey has ignored:

Indeed,
he broke with the longstanding F.B.I. policy of not commenting on
ongoing investigations. He also defied the wishes of senior officials in
the Department of Justice, according to various news reports early
Saturday afternoon. And he frustrated everyone — conservatives,
liberals, Trump, Clinton — because his disclosure was all questions, no
answers.

Regardless,
the media went nuts, declaring that the development could bend the
shape of the race and assuming damage to Clinton without any polling or
other evidence to back that up.

However the investigation turns out, things will not end well:

How is this supposed to play out? If, a few days from now, the F.B.I.
determines and announces that none of the emails contain classified
information or anything else of concern, will Trump and Clinton’s other
enemies conceivably believe that? Hah! They’ll be shouting “rigged” all
over again. They’ll be shouting it louder than ever.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Justin Trudeau ran on the slogan, "Real Change." Lately, the change appears to have been to the slogan -- which now reads, "More Of The Same." To make sure that we won't be getting More of the Same, a conference is being held this weekend at Carleton University. Susan Delacout writes:

This weekend, Carleton University’s School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies is holding a conference
about this whole business of criticizing the government. It’s called
“After the Deluge: Reframing/Sustaining Critique in Post-Harper Canada.”

Conservatives
might well see this conference as evidence that they did indeed have
lots of enemies in the ivory tower over the past decade. Or at least
many of them saw it that way.

Canada now has an activist government,
determined to make itself relevant in people’s lives again. The ways in
which it is inserting itself into the economy (slowing down the housing
markets, for instance) need scrutiny to see whether results match the
intent.

It’s also a government that has
invited criticism and measurement, and for the first time in history,
publicly releasing the marching orders for every cabinet minister.

Now
we don’t have to guess or opine on whether a minister is doing his or
her job — we have a published to-do list for every one of them. Those
lists could well be stamped with the same words politicians put on their
prepared texts for speeches: “Check against delivery.”

One of the most extensive such efforts is an online initiative called trudeaumetre.ca,
a running progress report on 219 promises of the Liberal government.
When I checked it this week, it was reporting 34 promises kept, 64 in
progress, 26 broken and 95 not yet started.

It's clear that we're going to have to check against delivery because what was promised may not be delivered as promised.

Friday, October 28, 2016

The Trudeau Government is considering selling the nation's airports to private corporations. Linda McQuaig writes:

Turning our airports into profit-making
business ventures will almost certainly drive up the costs for air
travellers, and the government insists that it has not yet made the
controversial decision to proceed.

But the
fact it’s seeking advice from Credit Suisse, a giant investment bank
with fingers deep into the privatization business, suggests Ottawa has
already moved well down that road.

The corporations, of course, are encouraging the move. However, those who run the airports are raising red flags:

In a joint article published
this week, Mark Laroche, CEO of Ottawa International Airport Authority,
and Craig Richmond, CEO of Vancouver Airport Authority, dismissed the
notion that privately owned airports would manage to make profits simply by, for instance, “selling more lattes.”

Instead,
Laroche and Richmond insisted passengers could expect higher parking
costs, airport improvement fees, cuts in cleaning staff and the end of
services such as free Wi-Fi.

Privatization
would also mean our major airports would be run by corporate boards,
whereas they’re currently run by non-profit airport authority boards
that include local community representatives, who are focused on more
than profit-making.

It's the same direction the Wynne government has taken in Ontario. It is selling Ontario Hydro into private hands in order to get the money to pay for infrastructure. Wynne's predecessor, Mike Harris, followed the same path when he sold Highway 407 into private hands.

The basic tenet of neo-liberalism is that all taxes are bad.The way to find the money is to sell off public assets. The faces change. But the agenda is still the same.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Thomas Edsall has an interesting column in this morning's New York Times. This election, he writes, has turned the two parties on their heads:

According to the Oct. 20 Reuters-IPSOS
tracking survey, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 5.6 points
among all whites earning $75,000 or more. This is a substantial
improvement on the previous Democratic record of support among upscale white voters, set in 2008 when Barack Obama lost to John McCain among such voters by 11 points.

According
to an Oct. 23 ABC News poll, Clinton also leads among all white college
graduates, 52-36. She has an unprecedented gender gap among these
voters, leading 62-30 among college-educated white women and tying among
college educated white men, 42-42.

What
these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a
complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the
1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites
voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at
combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.

Donald Trump's supporters -- downscale whites -- used to be a Democratic constituency. But now:

Nearly
half say they feel alienated from contemporary America (“a stranger in
their own land”), that they have little or no power to change the course
of events — 84.4 percent believe public officials do not care “what
people like me think.” 83.5 percent agreed that “in general, Americans
lived more moral and ethical lives 50 year ago.”

These
voters are convinced (72.6 percent) that they can no longer get ahead
in America through hard work, and that the government in Washington
threatens the freedom of “ordinary Americans” (75.3 percent). In a
nation where same-sex marriage has gained public acceptance and gays
routinely appear in television and movies, 54.9 percent of these voters
say their own “beliefs and values” are different from those of gays and
lesbians, and 66.2 percent oppose requiring every state to permit
same-sex marriages.

If the United States doesn't resemble the country we used to know, it's because education and wealth have become the great dividers. Those who have an education and money feel they have a future. Those who don't have those advantages see a country where everything looks dark.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Justin Trudeau came to office, claiming he would put an end to the cynicism of the Harper years. Michael Harris writes:

When Justin Trudeau was running to become prime minister, he said that
cynicism — about the future, the fate of our kids, and most especially
the political establishment — was a serious problem. Somehow, someone
just had to win back the public’s faith in the system. Otherwise, we
would become a society of malcontents, nay-sayers, and self-seekers
divorced from any meaningful sense of community. The national myth for
those people would be that the whole shooting match was rigged against
them for the benefit of the few.

On two critical files -- electoral reform and the environment -- Trudeau has been backing away from his promises:

The prime minister found himself in a firestorm of criticism when he
suggested in an interview with Le Devoir that he was backing away from
his commitment to ending Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.
The implication of his words was that his election had somehow fixed the
problem, or made it far less urgent at very least. That sparked one
commentator on social media to ask for a retraction of Trudeau’s words
or his recall.

Trudeau was supposed to be the antidote to years of Conservative
mismanagement on the environment. At best, his record has been spotty,
at worst, a betrayal of environmentalists who saw him as their champion.

While it is true Trudeau has finally put a price on carbon emissions,
it is also true that he supported the Site C dam project in British
Columbia, despite the opposition of environmentalists, First Nations
leaders, Amnesty International, and the Royal Society of Canada.

The Trudeau government has also failed to legislate its own
moratorium on oil-tanker traffic on the North Coast of the province.
Instead, it has given conditional approval to Pacific NorthWest LNG’s
massive $39-billion project that will also create five million tonnes of
carbon dioxide annually should it ever be built. Not exactly what the
summiteers in Paris had in mind — nor a lot of voters in British
Columbia who went Liberal.

South of the border, we are presently witnessing a lesson about the wages of cynicism:

Part of what everyone is witnessing in the U.S. Presidential election is
the extent to which “every day Americans” hate the political
establishment with a passion once reserved for the country’s foreign
enemies. So desperate have these people become, so overwhelming has been
the avalanche of lies and betrayals visited on them by politicians of
all stripes, that 50 million Americans are about to vote for a man whose
preferred form of greeting women is a hearty grope.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Andrew Nikiforuk has been writing for sometime that bitumen's heyday is over. There are four reasons that account for the decline and fall of black goo:

1. There is no way to clean up bitumen spills.

Basic science shows
that neither industry nor government has developed an effective spill
response for conventional oil on the high seas. As a consequence, marine
oil spill response remains a public relations sham that does not remove
spilled oil or fully restore damaged marine ecosystems.

Because the low-grade heavy oil must be diluted with a gasoline-like
product to move through a pipeline, it presents an even graver
logistical challenge than a conventional spill.

2. The economic case for pipelines has totally collapsed.

Bitumen will always require higher transportation costs and more
upgrading and processing due to its appalling quality. As a consequence,
it has always sold at a price differential of around $6 to $7 dollars
to conventional oil.

This historic differential widened when the Alberta government
rubber-stamped so many projects that industry flooded the North American
market with bitumen between 2000 and 2008. The differential dropped
again to historic norms as more and more refineries in the U.S.
retrofitted to process heavy oil.

Art Berman, a
reliable Houston-based oil analyst, calculates that industry is pumping
about half a million barrels a day more than what the world can burn or
afford. Most of this overproduction has come from Canada, the U.S. or
Iraq.

At the same time, demand is not really growing due to profound
global economic stagnation — a lasting legacy of incredibly high oil
prices from 2010 to 2014.

But overproduction has now depressed prices to the point that many
bitumen miners and American frackers continue to pump oil solely to
generate enough cash to service their increasing debt loads or keep
their creditors at bay. The world economy, as Berman notes, has become a
volatile casino.

“The oil industry is damaged and higher prices won’t fix it because the economy cannot bear them,” Berman adds. “It is unlikely that sustained prices will reach $70 in the next few years and possibly, ever.

3.Bitumen cannibalizes the economy.

Nearly 100 years ago, it cost but one barrel of conventional crude to
find and pump another 100 barrels. Today those energy returns now
average about one to 20. In the U.S., they’ve fallen to one to 10 and in
the oil sands they have collapsed to one to three, or in some cases
close to zero. In simple terms, bitumen doesn’t bring home the bacon.

Unfortunately, mined bitumen and fracked oil aren’t easy, cheap or
carbon neutral. Companies extracting fracked oil from Texas and North
Dakota typically spend four times more than what they make. Bitumen
miners aren’t much better. They burn more energy and capital, and all to
deliver fewer returns and surpluses to society. It’s like cycling
backwards.

Every day the science spells out some new horror: thinner Arctic ice;
acidic oceans; record hot spells; flooded cities; drought-stricken
crops. And every day, the economic costs grow dearer. The Fort McMurray
wildfire cost $3.5 billion and was determinedly fuelled by petroleum production. The mega-flood that submerged Louisiana cost more than $8 billion and was also primed by oil extraction.

The emissions math on climate change in Canada is now pretty simple. Environment Canada states
it boldly: “Emissions of GHGs from the oil and gas sector have
increased 79 per cent from 107 megatonnes (Mt) in 1990 to 192 Mt CO2 in
2014. This increase is mostly attributable to the increased production
of crude oil and the expansion of the oil sands industry.”
Canada can’t meet any reasonable target to decrease its climate-disrupting emissions by digging up more bitumen.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

This week, Justin Trudeau backed away from his promise to reform Canada's electoral system by the next election. There was -- rightly -- an explosion of criticism. By the end of the week, Trudeau was saying that his government is "deeply committed" to electoral reform. Alan Freeman writes:

Trudeau was rightly attacked from all sides for appearing to duck out of
his election promise to reform the first-past-the-post system in time
for the next election — and for the arrogance of the claim that his
election alone was enough to deal with the issue once and for all.

Dropping an election pledge is nothing new. Freeman writes that lots of leaders have backed away from promises if they thought they could get away with it. George W. Bush, for instance, tried to privatize Social Security:

Bush launched a campaign to promote a dramatic reform that would allow
Americans to set aside a portion of their Social Security and invest it
themselves in private accounts. The ideological right and the investment
industry, which had been pushing the idea for years, were thrilled. But
voters, particularly older ones, were horrified when they realized that
the change would simply impoverish the already-stretched Social
Security system and risk the guaranteed benefits they depended on in
return for the crapshoot of the stock market.

And Stephen Harper, with the support of Jim Flaherty, tried to harmonize the GST:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was initially a big proponent of GST
harmonization, throwing billions of dollars at Ontario and British
Columbia when they decided to come on board with a harmonized sales tax.
He embraced the view of leading economists and his own Finance
Department — that a harmonized GST would lead to tax efficiency and
remove the burden of provincial sales taxes from business.

But the moment grassroots opposition to harmonization started to build
in British Columbia, Flaherty ran for cover. He never spoke about
harmonization again. At the Finance Department, where I was working at
the time, the order came down that the department was not to answer any
questions about the issue — to act as if it didn’t exist. In the end,
B.C.’s harmonization effort died and the province refunded the big grant
it had been given to go ahead with harmonization. Flaherty and Harper
had dodged a bullet and spent not a cent of political capital doing it —
but an opportunity to change tax policy for the better was lost.

Electoral reform is a bullet Trudeau can't dodge. If he takes that tack, he will not make it through the next election -- even if it occurs under the First Past The Post system.

Friday, October 21, 2016

It's been a year since the Harper government was sent packing. But, Gerry Caplan writes, if those vying to replace Stephen Harper are any indication, their defeat taught the Conservatives nothing:

There’s the widespread view among people within the party that the
problem was their “tone.” It’s not at all clear what they think they
mean by this, but it seems to have little to do with a series of mean
and bigoted policies that failed to appeal to any but the Conservative
base.

The Harperites have, so far, not morphed into Boris Johnson or Donald Trump. However, they haven't morphed into anything:

For example, take Kellie Leitch, who
seemed at first to be ashamed of her shabby role in the Conservative
pledge to establish a tip line to report barbaric cultural practices to
the RCMP, but has since doubled down on the very notion.

As
a leadership candidate, she is promoting a “discussion” of Canadian
values for immigrants. Yet when given an opportunity by interviewers,
she refuses to discuss anything except how very, very much she wants to
discuss. So she simply advances her meaningless slogan, then repeats it
over and over again without any elaboration.

Then there's Maxime Bernier. "Quebec MP Maxime Bernier wants to turn Canada into a libertarian
dystopia; he’s the Ayn Rand candidate, beloved no doubt by many
impressionable first-year university students."

And, of course, there's Brad Trost:

Someone named Brad Trost – allegedly an MP
from Saskatchewan – offers to turn the clock back by repudiating both a
woman’s right to choose and same-sex marriage.

The
Conservative Party itself entered modern history only in May when its
convention voted that marriage need not be defined as between a man and
woman, something Canada itself had decided a decade ago. But history is
moving far too fast for Mr. Trost and for that third of the convention
delegates who voted against the resolution. But early indications are
that they are resisting Mr. Trost’s reactionary lure.

Harper's Conservatives were always stuck in the 19th century. The only member of the party who wasn't was Michael Chong. And, for that reason, Chong will face a tough slog for the leadership of the party.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Last night proved beyond a doubt that Donald Trump has his foot to the floor and is headed to the wall. He has offended women mightily. Last night's vow to repeal Roe v. Wade will add to the Access Hollywood debacle. But, along with women, he's also mobilized Latinos and African Americans against him. E.J. Dionne writes:

The states on Clinton's new target list include Arizona and,
of all places, Texas. In Nevada, the polling is mixed, though Clinton
seems to have gained ground. A Monmouth University Poll released Tuesday
put Clinton ahead of Trump here by seven points. Trump was up by two
points last month. But a new Washington Post-SurveyMonkey poll, which
showed her in a commanding position nationally, had her still down here
by four.

All these states have something important in common: They
include large numbers of Latino voters, who are clearly mobilizing to
defeat Trump. He is also suffering from profound weaknesses among
African-Americans, college educated voters of all backgrounds, and the
young.

After its second loss to Barack Obama, the Republican Party took a hard look at itself and concluded:

The nation's demographic changes add to the urgency of
recognizing how precarious our position has become," its authors wrote.
"If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to
engage them, and show our sincerity."

They went on: "If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP
nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States ... they
will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we
say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not
want them here, they will close their ears to our policies."

One wonders if Trump read the report. He's certainly not following its recommendations. There is still disagreement about whether or not Albert Einstein was the source of the classic definition of insanity.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Pierre Trudeau famously quipped that Joe Clark wanted to be "headwaiter to the provinces." Susan Delacourt writes that his son will be no headwaiter:

In the years since Trudeau the elder left the scene, his successors
have adopted a number of other approaches to the provinces, from the
deferential to the collaborative to the virtually absent. From
obsequious waiter to dumbwaiter, you might say.

But now it’s looking like we’d better get used to Ottawa coming to
the federal-provincial table with some sharp and definite views about
what’s on the menu. Even as the provinces grapple with Ottawa’s ultimatum on carbon pricing, delivered just weeks ago, they’re now being told that federal money for health will come with conditions attached.

Yesterday, Jane Philpott's meeting with provincial health ministers broke up without any progress on negotiating a new health accord. The provinces want more money. The Feds want to carefully track what happens to new money:

In September, Philpott declared:
“It’s time to reclaim the political will, time and resources to develop
and implement bold reforms in the funding and organization of front
line delivery.”

It’s been a while since we’ve heard a health minister (or a prime
minister, for that matter) declare that money going to the provinces for
social programs would have strings attached. “Reclaiming the political
will,” in that context, sounds a bit like a government that’s decided it
wants to be more than a valet to the provinces.

Trudeau declared that he wanted to establish a new relationship with the provinces. The provinces want to keep the old one. Ay, there's the rub.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Canadians like to think that Donald Trump could never happen here. But he's been here and left -- for the moment. His name was Rob Ford. And he had lots of editorial support. David Beers writes:

As Donald Trump burst into an orange fireball melting down the Republican
Party, one pundit telling us why was the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee.
His analysis
on Saturday echoed others: Gullible Republicans had fooled themselves
into believing Trump could be tamed. They shrugged off his deep personal
flaws and the divisions his bigotry would sow. Now “the Donald has come
home to roost.”

If the GOP loses big “it will only have itself to blame” for siding with
those who “seeded the clouds for Trump.” Blame some media, said Gee.
Blame those “talk-show ranters” who cheered the rise of an unhinged
narcissist with right-wing populist appeal.

Which, by the way, is pretty much what Marcus Gee did six years ago. In
February 2010 he cheered the rise of an unhinged narcissist with
right-wing populist appeal in his column headlined: “Rob Ford, Please Run. You’re the Right Guy for a Lefty Race.”

Ford was not very bright, driven by demons and -- in the end -- doomed. But he railed against political correctness -- just as Margaret Wente does:

The country club conservative Margaret Wente, for example, drolly makes
fun of Donald Trump. She also happens to regularly nurture the climate
that helps Donald Trump thrive. Wente may shake her head at the “angry man yelling at me on TV.” She may marvel
that “What’s stupefying is that so many people can’t see that the
emperor is naked.” But Donald Trump and his supporters would resonate
with much else she says, and they would appreciate her digs at his
enemies: We have Trump, she argued
in August, because “The Democrats have morphed into an alliance of
liberal elites and minorities, with a relentless agenda of political
correctness that has driven millions of people away.”

Donald Trump could happen anywhere at any time. All it takes is editorial -- and public -- support.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Justin Trudeau's decision to put a price on carbon -- over the objections of some of the provinces and territories -- is a signal that the hard part has begun. Robin Sears writes:

Justin Trudeau’s
decision to devote a large chunk of his accumulated political capital
imposing a clear, mandatory path on pricing carbon is the first of
several big choices he faces, each of which will help determine his
survival and his legacy.

He
is about to discover the first of many ironies about choice in
political life. Many enemies, and even some friends, will always be
angry with your choice, especially big decisions on risky projects.
They’re hedging their risks, betting on your failure.

Your
internal opponents and your political opposition will attack every
choice as dangerous, irresponsible, too late, too expensive — fill in
the blank. It’s insurance for them, if you stumble. And curiously, it’s a
guaranteed media hit.

There are more difficult decisions to come, like re-engaging in United Nations forces around the world and renegotiating a healthcare agreement with the provinces. There are lessons in each of these tasks; and we'll see how well the Liberals have learned them.

But there are also lessons for the opposition parties:

Justin Trudeau’s opponents need to understand their
certain failure in challenging a big political choice with scary fairy
tales and niggling, whining attack. To succeed in persuading Canadians
to come to their vision of a national future — they need to offer one!

Listening
to Conservatives whinge about adding a quarter a litre to gas prices
and then claiming “billions and billions” of revenue harm — as a
strategy on climate change — will make even their own mothers sigh in
quiet frustration. New Democrats who want to move votes, cannot simply
say no to this pipeline and no to that pipeline, then claim there are
not opposed to pipelines per se. Or that they have a plan for the safe,
efficient transport of oil and gas — unless they outline what theirs is
and why it is better.

As
a nation, we now must face an array of tough choices about which we
have hesitated and prevaricated overlong. A majority of voters endorsed
that message last October. To consider other political choices Canadians
will first expect New Democrats and Conservatives to offer an
alternative vision on how to integrate First Nations into decisions on
resource development, not to simply sneer “too little, too late!”

Both opposition parties could offer dramatically different visions than Trudeau's. But being the parties of no will lead nowhere. The Republicans have been The Party of No for twenty-five years. Look at where -- and who -- that has got them.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

The War in Syria has severely damaged relations between Russia and The United States. Tony Burman writes:

Not since the darkest
days of the Cold War, we are being told, are the dangers of a
catastrophic conflict between Russia and the West so genuine.

Last
Sunday on Russian television, Dmitry Kiselyov, an influential current
affairs host, warned that U.S. military action against the
Russian-backed Syrian regime could provoke a world war: “Offensive behaviour toward Russia has a nuclear dimension.”

This week, Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, wrote that today’s global situation is “more dangerous” than the Cold War.
And former Soviet leader and Nobel winner Mikhail Gorbachev warned that
“the world has a reached a dangerous point” because of the deepening
Russia-U.S. clash over Syria.

But there are differences between the standoff which followed World War II and today's standoff:

Putin may strut, may preen and may bluster — and, like the KGB operative
he once was, he is skilled at manipulating the optics of a situation.
But like Trump, his comrade-in-arms in the U.S., Putin is a phoney. When
all is said and done, he doesn’t have the economic or military
firepower to deliver on his threats. Compared with the Soviet Union,
Russia’s economy is strikingly weak and integrated with the West. If
tensions ever escalated to the point of actual war, Russia would be
annihilated. And Putin, above all, knows that.

Russia’s sabre-rattling is unnerving the West. It is messing with the
heads of American and European politicians, military leaders and
opinion-makers. In response, NATO and its member states, led by the
U.S., are embarking on their own military buildup, particularly in
countries neighbouring Russia. They are using the Russian threat,
exaggerated as it is, as a pretext for challenging Russia in its own
backyard. That’s a recipe for disaster. Putin isn’t the only threat
here: our leaders also need to be watched.

Even though Trump will likely crash and burn on election day, Nov. 8,
the poisoned American political system will still be with us. And it’s a
system increasingly corrupted by money. Regardless of who resides in
the White House, there will be many Republican members, perhaps a
majority, whose political success is tied to America’s war machine. This
is reflected in those military bases and military jobs that reside in
their districts. Even though the Pentagon itself admits that the
American military is bloated and over-resourced, it is in the interests
of these politicians to keep this war machine growing.

And, should Hillary win, we're told that Putin loathes her. The West is in a tight spot. It's easy to get into a war -- much easier than it is to get out.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Donald Trump gets more reprehensible with each passing day. But he did not rise to where he is on his own initiative. Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Postthat there have been many people behind the ascension of Trump. And he has been a long time coming:

The Trump fiasco has been more than two decades in the making, going
back to Newt Gingrich’s destruction of civility, Bill Clinton’s personal
misconduct, a Supreme Court that, in Bush v. Gore, delegitimized democracy,
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney squandering the warm courage of national
unity after 9/11, a bipartisan cycle of revenge in Congress, angry
liberals portraying Bush as a war criminal,
the fury and racial animus of the tea party and the birthers, GOP
leaders too timid to tamp down the excesses, and Supreme Court decisions
that allowed anonymous groups to spend unlimited sums poisoning the airwaves with vicious and false political speech.

The media have also had their role to play:

My colleagues and I in the news business deserve much of the blame. Fox
News essentially created Trump as a political figure, validating his
birther nonsense and giving him an unparalleled platform before he
launched his campaign. The rest of the news media, most visibly CNN,
gave the entertainer undiluted and uncritical coverage (at least until
he secured the nomination), sacrificing journalistic integrity for
viewers and readers. If you don’t report on Trump’s latest action,
utterance or outrage, you won’t get the clicks or the ratings. And the
combination of social media and a news industry fragmented by ideology
allows an increasingly polarized public to choose only information that
confirms their political views.

Trump knows how to play people for suckers. And there have been a lot of suckers. In the end, Americans will have to look in their mirrors.

Friday, October 14, 2016

There are those who believe that engaging in "what might have been" speculation is wasted energy. But Linda McQuaig does precisely that in today's Toronto Star. Doug Peters -- the former chief economist for the TD Bank and former Liberal cabinet minister -- died last week. Peters grew up in Brandon, Manitoba during the Great Depression. That experience -- and the training he received on the way to getting a PhD in finance from the University of Pennsylvania -- made him a committed Keynesian.

But it was Peters misfortune to be at the the cabinet table when Milton Friedman was all the rage. McQuaig writes:

Despite his Bay St. pedigree
and a PhD. in finance from University of Pennsylvania, Peters rejected
the business world’s obsession with deficits and smaller government.

From
his seat next to [Paul] Martin at top-level budget meetings, the soft-spoken,
articulate Peters repeatedly challenged the deficit hysteria that
gripped the Finance department and increasingly controlled government
policy. To Peters, the key problem was unemployment — which hovered
above 10 per cent — not the deficit.

Indeed,
the way to solve the deficit problem was to reduce unemployment, Peters
argued. As he once told a parliamentary committee: “Unemployed people
pay less tax. That is one of the most certain laws of all economics. It
should be inscribed on plaques and hung in the offices of prime
ministers and premiers across the country.”

There were some who sided with Peters:

He got support from an unlikely source — a Goldman Sachs report in
September 1994 identifying unemployment, rather than excessive
government spending, as Canada’s key problem, and noting that once full
employment was achieved, “the budget gap of Canada vanishes.”

But Friedman had received the Nobel Prize. How could be be wrong?

Time has proved Friedman wrong and Peters right. Another one of history's ironies.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Yesterday, Tony Clement dropped out of the Conservative leadership race and Chris Alexander dropped in. The Conservative ranks are teeming with ambition. But ambition is expensive. Brent Rathgeber writes:

Running for the leadership of a Canadian political party is no modest
undertaking. Including the registration fee and a subsequent charge for
access to the membership list, it costs $100,000 to play.

But that’s only the beginning. Canada is a big country. Given that
the leadership contest is weighted — that is, the 338 electoral
districts are each assigned an equal number of points in the final vote —
it’s important that serious candidates at least show up in most ridings
and regions. That’s a lot of flights, a lot of hotel rooms.

In the end, it's money that will determine who will leave and who will go. And money is tied to an MP's record. Clement's Achilles Heel was his record:

He will never be able to walk back the reputation he picked up during
the 2010 G8 Summit. Clement was in charge of a $50 million
infrastructure program intended to reduce border congestion; some of the
money was used to build parks, walkways and gazebos in Clement’s riding
in advance of the summit. To a lot of people, he’ll always be ‘Gazebo
Tony’.

Although that pork barrel episode probably guaranteed his re-election
as MP in Ontario Lake Country, it also destroyed his credibility with
fiscal conservatives across the nation.

Clement is only the first contender to drop out. There will be others. It's impossible at this point to guess who will be the last person standing.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

While Donald Trump huffs, puffs and sniffles -- and while the Republican Party tears itself apart -- there will be those who take solace in The Donald's Demise. However, Michael Den Tandt writes, Trump's defeat will not put Trumpism to rest:

Trumpism is bigger than the man. For evidence, juxtapose a map of the
two parties’ current support, with one of regional income distribution.

The safe red (Republican) states swing from the Deep South
(Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina) northward in a
band through the Midwest (Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota),
and into the upper Midwest. These are also the regions with the highest
concentrations of Americans living below the poverty line (about $24,000
for a family of four).

The key swing states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania), where Trump and
Democrat Bernie Sanders launched their respective insurgencies, are
regions where traditional economies have been disrupted by
globalization. Hence Trump’s repeated promises to “bring back our jobs,”
resurrect heavy manufacturing and re-open shuttered steel mills. He’s
giving voters in populous, influential states precisely the comfort they
want to hear.

What Trump is selling is "pure fantasy." But that makes no difference:

Trump has given voice to a new constituency. That he is personally unfit
to be president is a historical fluke. His losing next month will not
prevent states such as Ohio or Pennsylvania from going full nativist in
future, unless more people there can see the hope of a better economic
future.

Trump's people are not going anywhere. And Hillary -- deplorable though they may be -- will have to deal with them:

A future President Hillary Clinton will need something like a Marshall
Plan — a New Deal might be a better term — to bring hope to the Rust
Belt. Or she’ll face another revolt in four years, likely led by someone
more personally fit, and capable, than Trump.

On Thursday, a senior general acknowledged
that, over the last few months, Canadian special forces operating in
northern Iraq have become increasingly involved in front-line skirmishes
against Daesh fighters.

“The mission has changed,” said Brig.-Gen. Peter Dawe. “We are more engaged on the line … the risk has increased.”

The truth, whether the government wants to admit it or not, is that Canada's soldiers are in harm's way:

Both the current Liberal
government and the Conservative one it replaced have gone to great
lengths to assure Canadians that Iraq is not another Afghanistan. So
these semantic debates over the definition of word “combat” have taken
on great political meaning.

The Conservatives used to say shooting in self-defence was not real combat.

Under the Liberals, the military brass is engaging in similar linguistic contortions to avoid the dreaded word.

According
to one, Canadian troops have to be the “principal combatants” to engage
in combat.

According to another, combat only occurs once soldiers have
crossed an imaginary line on the battlefield.

In Iraq, it's always been hard to distinguish the difference between enemy and ally:

But in the real world of war, the differences become blurred — particularly when the battle lines are fluid.

Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish forces don’t trust
one another. Moreover, as the Financial Times reported last week, the
fissures that have always existed within these three major groups are
beginning to widen.

It’s not that long ago that rival Kurdish parties in northern Iraq were involved in a murderous shooting war with one another.

So let's stop fogging things up with semantic distinctions. Canada is at war. Our troops are in the middle of it. In war, soldiers and sailors get killed.

Monday, October 10, 2016

It was an ugly night. The kind of night that -- after it's over -- leaves you with the feeling that you've got to hit the shower. This morning, The New York Times published a page which fact checked statements from the debate. Not everything that Hillary Clinton said -- particularly about her emails -- was true.

But what was disturbing was the tsunami of lies which Donald Trump unleashed in the space of ninety minutes:

Trump said Clinton wants "amnesty for everybody, come on it, come on over." -- Not True.

He claimed,"Clinton was there for Obama's line in the sand" -- Not True

Trump said the United States signed a "peace treaty" to bring an end to the war in Syria. It was a ceasefire.

Trump said "growth is down to 1%" and the United States and that country has the highest taxes in the world. Absolutely false.

Trump said that Clinton wants to go to a single payer health care system -- as we have here. Again, absolutely false.

Trump said Clinton has never used the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism." That, too is a flat out lie.

You get the idea. I don't know if truth matters anymore in American elections. And, as Trump paced the stage, it was clear that he has the attention span of a five year old child.

Sunday, October 09, 2016

When it comes to taxing carbon, the Conservatives are into self-flagellation. Foremost among them is Brad Wall. Stephen Maher writes:

Like the previous federal Conservative government, Wall seems to
represent the view held by some fossil fuel companies — that climate
change likely isn’t caused by carbon emissions, but even if it is we
shouldn’t do anything about it, since little Canada can’t have much
impact on global emissions and we’d be certain to lose revenue and jobs.

That seems to also be the view of Calgary MP Michelle Rempel, who took
to Twitter to attack Telus and other companies that support Trudeau’s
carbon plan.

Economically speaking, the Trudeau
government’s approach is the right one. Environmentally speaking, too.
The question is whether, over the long run, it can be sustained
politically. That’s up to you, dear reader and dear voter.

Ottawa
is creating a national standard and leaving it up to each province to
decide how to meet it. Beginning in 2018, carbon will have to be priced
at $10 a tonne, with the price rising by $10 a year until it hits $50 in
2022.

What’s all that in plain
English? A $10 tax on a tonne of carbon is equivalent to a tax on
gasoline of 2 cents per litre. A $50 per tonne price means a gas tax of
11 cents a litre.

And the Globe pointed out that, if Wall so chose, that money could go to tax cuts:

A conservative provincial government, like Mr. Wall’s Saskatchewan
Party, could decide to take advantage of higher taxes on gasoline,
diesel, natural gas and coal to lower taxes on things everyone wants
more of, like income and investment. A conservative-minded premier could
promise to turn every dollar of carbon levy into a dollar in tax cuts.
That would make for an interesting contrast to Alberta and Ontario,
which are largely planning on spending their carbon billions.

Saturday, October 08, 2016

On October 1st, the minimum wage went up in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Prince Edward Island. It was Alberta's increase that caused a lot of howling. Alan Freeman writes:

Following through on an election promise, the NDP government there is
raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by late 2018 on an incremental
basis. This week’s raise to $12.20
amounted to a rise of $1, or more than 8 per cent over the previous
level, and leaves Alberta with the highest provincial rate. (Nunavut, at
$13, is higher still.)

The business lobby -- predictably -- was apoplectic:

Restaurants Canada, the industry lobby, claimed that 78 per cent of
its members in the province would cut hours and 50 per cent would lay
off workers, based on a survey of members.

Express Employment Professionals, a temporary help agency, said a 10
per cent increase in the minimum wage could cut national employment
of minimum-wage workers by up to 20 per cent.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) claims that
the $12.20 hourly wage could lead to up to 50,000 job losses in the
province. That’s quite the alarming prediction, since there are only
60,000 workers currently earning minimum wage in Alberta.

And the CFIB, always looking out for the best interests of low-wage
employees, also warned ominously that once the minimum wage goes up to
$15 in Alberta, a full-time worker at that rate will have to pay $700 a
year in additional provincial taxes.

In an oft-cited U.S. study, Princeton University economist Alan Krueger
looked at the impact on fast-food employment of the 1992 increase in the
minimum wage in New Jersey. He conducted a telephone survey of
fast-food outlets in the state and in neighbouring Pennsylvania, where
the minimum wage was unchanged, before and after the wage hike in New
Jersey. He found no discernible difference in employment in both states.

John Schmitt, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy
Research in the U.S., sought to explain why modest increases in the
minimum wage have little impact on employment. Surveying a raft of
studies, he found that employers can opt for alternatives that don’t
necessarily mean layoffs. They can raise prices. They can cut hours.
They can reduce pay or bonuses for higher-paid employees or managers.
They can also take measures to improve productivity by using
labour-saving devices or insisting on better performance from employees.
Or they can accept lower profits.

Schmitt adds that employers also can benefit from a minimum wage
spike — because when wages go up, employee turnover declines.
Better-paid employees are more loyal employees. Lower turnover leads to a
reduction in training costs.

Henry Ford proved a hundred years ago that raising employee wages can be good for business. He realized that, if his business was to survive, he would have to share his wealth.

Friday, October 07, 2016

In the West, the old Cold War was portrayed as
a battle between Communist dictatorship and capitalist freedom. Given
that Russia has now embraced capitalism, those categories are no longer
quite so neat.

As a result, the new Cold
War is a little vaguer. It is portrayed as a battle between thuggery and
the rule of law — brutality versus niceness.

In
this scenario, the U.S. and its allies are said to be the nice ones.
Russia, personified in its president, Vladimir Putin, is said to
represent brutality.

Calculated brutality is not a new tactic. It's as old as Sherman's March to the Sea:

Students of the American Civil War will recall
Gen. William T. Sherman’s march to the sea through Georgia in 1864,
during which his Union army burned crops, slaughtered livestock and laid
waste to the Confederate countryside.

As Sherman said at the time, his aim was to make “a hostile people … old and young, rich and poor feel the hard hand of war.”

As a tactic, sometimes it works. It worked for Sherman. Sometimes it doesn't. Carpet bombing Vietnam didn't work. But we miss the point unless we understand what is behind the sound and fury:

The real reason for Russia’s increasing
involvement seems to be that Moscow now sees Assad as the only political
figure able to keep Syria from falling into chaos.

Syria is not far from Russia’s Caucasus, a region with its own Islamic insurgencies.

More
to the point, the chaos in Libya that followed Western military
intervention there — as well as the civil strife in Iraq after
Washington’s removal of Saddam Hussein — have served as a reminder:
Getting rid of dictators can sometimes make things worse.

From
time to time, the U.S. has understood this. That’s why, after a brief
fling with the reformers of Egypt’s Arab Spring, President Barack Obama
threw his support to the coup plotters who now run that country’s brutal
military regime.

But for Obama, Assad has
been a step too far. Perhaps his brutality is too blatant. Egyptian
strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi merely executes his political opponents.
He doesn’t barrel-bomb them.

It's hard to predict where and when it will all end. Both sides have huge arsenals -- enough to leave Syria completely in ruins.

Thursday, October 06, 2016

Hillary Clinton is a flawed candidate. All presidential candidates are. I have argued in this space that, given who Donald Trump is, voting for a third party candidate is highly dangerous. I have pointed to the history of Weimar Germany as a cautionary tale. Gerry Caplan points to recent American history to make the same case:

The most infamous case in recent history was 16 years ago, when Ralph
Nader argued that Al Gore was no worse than George W. Bush. Nader got a
derisory 2.74 per cent of the vote, just enough to ensure Gore’s defeat.
The world got Bush and Cheney, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and a great
deal of the chaos and horror in the Middle East from which we all still
suffer.

But the 2000 election isn't the only example of how voting for a third party candidate brought on disaster:

In modern times, this phenomenon goes back
to 1956, when Adlai Stevenson challenged Republican president Dwight
“Ike” Eisenhower’s bid for re-election. Ike was a natural small “c”
conservative, while Stevenson was widely considered to be a principled
liberal. But in the paranoid atmosphere of Cold War America, no
seriously ambitious politician, let alone the urbane Stevenson, could
take liberalism too far.

He was
therefore easy enough to criticize by the wonderful Democratic
socialists represented by the magazine Dissent, who explained how
Stevenson would sell out the left if he ever won. I was easily
persuaded, but America was not. Ike was overwhelmingly re-elected, and
with him came Richard Nixon as his vice-president and an unleashed CIA
to continue its dirty work around the world.

Another problem for the left came [twelve] years later, when Hubert Humphrey sought the Democratic
nomination to replace president Lyndon B. Johnson. Humphrey was both the
best and the worst of American liberalism. He was mostly strong on
civil rights, trade unions and social welfare, but as LBJ’s
vice-president during the Vietnam War he made himself a despicable
apologist for the war.

When Bobby
Kennedy was murdered, Humphrey won the nomination at the Democratic
Convention. Many progressives boycotted the election. In the end, old
Tricky Dick finally won the presidency by a hair, even though it’s
possible the progressive vote could have defeated him. Next stop: the
continuation of the Vietnam War, the secret war against Cambodia and
Laos, the first-ever “gate” and the subversion of the American
Constitution.

It was George Santayana -- not me -- who wrote that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories walked out of the room when Justin Trudeau announced a couple of days ago that he was putting a price on carbon. Chantal Hebert writes that the tax is no cash grab. What Trudeau is doing is filling a vacuum:

For this is not about replenishing the coffers of an impoverished federal government.

Trudeau’s planned introduction of a national floor price
for carbon in 2018 marks the belated end of a federal vacuum that has
seen successive prime ministers — from Jean Chrétien onward — make
climate-change commitments on the international scene and then do little
to ensure Canada meets them.

And most of the provinces already have schemes in place that will meet the $10 a ton threshold:

For example, B.C.
started off with a carbon tax at the $10 level … almost a decade ago.
That provincial tax now stands at $30. Under the plan announced by
Trudeau on Monday, the federal floor would be raised by $10 a year for
five years to reach $50 a tonne by 2022.

(As
an aside, by the time Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C. have to up
their game to keep up with the national escalator clause, the 2019
federal election will be over.)

Moreover, despite the caterwauling, the the program is not a top down creation:

Provided they meet or exceed the federal floor
price on carbon emissions, the provinces will also continue to be free
to pursue climate-change mitigation schemes of their own choosing.

At
some point, though, the onus will be on them to demonstrate that they
are meeting or exceeding the federal floor price. Quebec and Ontario,
for instance, have opted for a cap-and-trade system. Over the summer,
the provinces and the federal government failed to reach a consensus on
equivalencies between carbon taxes and cap-and-trade pricing. The two
will eventually have to be reconciled.

But "if the federal government does tax emissions in their place, it will
return the proceeds to the provincial treasuries, presumably leaving
them free to use the revenues to offset the cost of carbon pricing with
tax breaks."

The tax on carbon is a classic Canadian conundrum. It's never been easy to make the confederation work.

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Tom Walkom gives the Trudeau government some credit for reversing the direction of the previous government:

The new Liberal government negotiated a deal
with the provinces to expand the Canada Pension Plan, something the
Harper Conservatives were dead-set against. It also replaced Harper’s
universal baby bonus with one targeted to income.

It
established the inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women that
Harper refused to set up. It reduced the eligibility age for full
old-age security back down to 65.

But in many ways, the new government is very much like the one it replaced:

The country got a
taste of that last week when Ottawa approved a liquefied natural gas
plant on British Columbia’s Pacific coast, as well as a pipeline to that
plant.

It was the same decision Harper would have made. And it angered the same critics.

Environmentalists
pointed to the massive increase in carbon emissions that will result
from the decision. Some First Nations said it will destroy the local
fish habitat.

It was a reminder that Trudeau, like Harper, sees energy exports as crucial for the Canadian economy.

And
like Harper, the new prime minister is willing to sacrifice
environmental and aboriginal concerns in order to get things done.

On terrorism and national security, it's more of the same:

The Liberals promised to roll back elements of
Bill C-51, Harper’s addition to anti-terror laws. But so far they have
done no such thing.

In fact, as Canada’s
privacy commissioner has noted, under the Liberals, police and the
security services are using some of these new powers apace.

Militarily,
the Trudeau government kept its promise to remove Canada’s fighter
planes from the war in Iraq. But it compensated by tripling the number
of Canadian military advisers who are on the ground in that war.

The
means may differ from those employed by Harper. But the aim — to
militarily support the U.S. in the war against Islamic radicals — is
unchanged.

And, on healthcare, it also appears to be more of the same:

Health spending? The Harper government had unilaterally decided to cut
the annual increase in health care transfers to the provinces by roughly
50 per cent next year. The Liberals seem prepared to go ahead with
this, although they say they do have some additional money on hand for
home care.

Monday, October 03, 2016

The Conservatives started a fire when they accused Gerald Butts and Katie Telford of sticking taxpayers with exorbitant costs for moving from Toronto to Ottawa. Now they're caught in their own backdraft. Michael Harris writes:

The Conservative Opposition had fun with the PMO expense scandal until
the issue bit them in the ass. Tory MP and leadership candidate, Brad
Trost, led the charge against his own party’s hypocrisy. Trost went on
Twitter to demand that Guy Giorno, one of former PM Harper’s chiefs of
staff, follow the lead of Butts and Telford by repaying part of his
estimated $93,000 move from Toronto to Ottawa. Again, it was not because
Giorno had done anything unethical or illegal; it was just that Trost
thought Canadians were being sucked dry by people, well, who believed
that they were entitled their entitlements.

And then Rona Ambrose came under scrutiny:

Ambrose charged the public $8,000 in condo rent and a further $869
for a three-night stay in an Ottawa hotel, a bill made necessary because
Stornoway was apparently not ready for her to occupy. The Huffington
Post reported that the bulk of these expenses were incurred from January
to March 2016 — after she had moved into her official residence.

The CPC and Ambrose have since insisted that the interim leader did
not claim expenses for accommodation while living rent-free at
Stornoway. The Tory damage control line was that all of the expenses
claimed by Ambrose were incurred before she moved to the official
residence and were therefore admissible under the rules.

But they miss the point that Trost seems to have grasped: the issue
for Canadians is not only a question of regulatory compliance, but of
fairness. Why should the public have to pay for breaking the lease on
her $2000 a month condo when Ambrose is making a quarter of a million
dollars a year in publicly financed salary and moving into a
taxpayer-funded mansion? What possible difference does it make to the
average Joe and Jane whether Ambrose — the interim leader of the
opposition — is resident in a Rockcliffe mansion or living out her condo
lease that was perfectly fine when she was a cabinet minister?

The solution is to have the Auditor General look at MPs' expenses -- as he examined Senators' expenses.

But, once again, the Conservatives have been hogtied by their own hypocrisy.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.